Computer systems equipped with software for generating dynamic multimedia presentations, are well known in the art.
There are several pieces of software on the market which are dedicated to multimedia presentations. The most widespread is Microsoft PowerPoint®. PowerPoint runs on personal computers and is widely used by business people, educators, students, and trainers and is among the most prevalent forms of persuasion technology. As a part of Microsoft Office, Microsoft Office PowerPoint has become the world's most widely used presentation program.
In this software, as in most other presentation software, text, graphics, movies, and other objects are positioned on individual pages or “slides”. The “slide” analogy is a reference to the slide projector, a device which has become somewhat obsolete due to the use of PowerPoint and other presentation software. Slides can be printed, or (more often) displayed on-screen and navigated through at the command of the presenter.
PowerPoint provides two types of movements. Entrance, emphasis, and exit of elements on a slide itself are controlled by what PowerPoint calls Custom Animations. Transitions, on the other hand are movements between slides. These can be animated in a variety of ways. The overall design of a presentation can be controlled with a master slide; and the overall structure, extending to the text on each slide, can be edited using a primitive outliner.
Sharing a PowerPoint presentation with others generally means sending the whole file by email, or copying the whole presentation file on a removable storage such as a USB memory key for reading by another computer.
And the richer the presentation will be, the bigger will be this whole file, which makes sharing difficult. In this regard, there is no convenient way to only send changes from an older version of a given presentation.
Adobe Flash® technology offers another way to make presentations. Flash animation possibilities combined with interactivity bring more liberty to enrich presentation with visuals, texts, videos.
With Internet democratization and broadband connections, Flash applications are now widely used. Even if these applications are conceived to be shown on screen, they can also be printed.
Thanks to the large possibilities offered by this technology, there is no limit but the imagination to make any kind of transition animations.
Although Flash presentations are now very widespread on the Internet, the underlying application design often provides static contents only, which means contents are not impacted by external data.
Nevertheless, The up-to-date Flash technology allows to build a Flash application based on dynamic contents, based on the ActionScript programming language which allows to manipulate variables, store and display data, etc.
Indeed, Flash-based applications (usually from websites) provide dynamic contents through a back office or administration page, usually in two steps: first the database where information is stored is modified by an administrator through at the back office level; then the information is dynamically read by a Flash application and displayed in front office. Thus a single Flash file requested by the user will change its state according to external data collected from the back office.
Although this presentation generating software is nowadays very thorough and capable, there is no convenient way for a user to modify (such as personalize) an existing presentation or for exchanging personalized presentations between users without the requirement of broadband communications or large physical mass storage compatible with the large size of such files.
More particularly, when an existing presentation is to be modified, adapted, or personalized to a specific context or public, it is necessary to rely on specific editing tools which can be mastered only by skilled people and the use of which can be fastidious and time consuming.
And this needs to be done each time a change, even a minute change, is to be brought to the presentation.
In addition, volume of presentation data can be quite large, in particular when multiple video sequences are involved (sometimes several hundreds of megabytes), and having numerous personalized presentations involve that a large disk space is required, and that any transmission of presentations on a network, e.g. via email, is virtually impossible.